Drawing Clustered Graphs on Disk Arrangements

Abstract: Let $G=(V, E)$ be a planar graph and let $\mathcal{C}$ be a partition of $V$. We refer to the graphs induced by the vertex sets in $\mathcal{C}$ as Clusters. Let $D_{\mathcal C}$ be an arrangement of disks with a bijection between the disks and the clusters. Akitaya et al. give an algorithm to test whether $(G, \mathcal{C})$ can be embedded onto $D_{\mathcal C}$ with the additional constraint that edges are routed through a set of pipes between the disks. Based on such an embedding, we prove that every clustered graph and every disk arrangement without pipe-disk intersections has a planar straight-line drawing where every vertex is embedded in the disk corresponding to its cluster. This result can be seen as an extension of the result by Alam et al. who solely consider biconnected clusters. Moreover, we prove that it is NP-hard to decide whether a clustered graph has such a straight-line drawing, if we permit pipe-disk intersections.